RESEARCH REPORT

C O N STR U CTI O N
SAFETY
A S S O C I AT I O N O F
O N TA R I O

The effect of
supervisory training on
lost-time injury rates
in construction
D. J. McVittie, DOHS
P. Vi, M.Eng
February 2009

The Effect of Supervisory Training on

Lost-Time Injury Rates in Construction
D. J. McVittie, DOHS, Construction Safety Association of Ontario
P. Vi, M.Eng, Construction Safety Association of Ontario

Abstract
Many organizations, companies, and agencies at the forefront of construction health and
safety in have long emphasized supervisory training as a key factor for improving health and
safety performance 1,2,3. While much has been written on this subject in trade magazines and
elsewhere, little quantitative research has been published on this subject.
A recent decision in the construction sector in Lambton County (the area surrounding Sarnia,
Ontario, Canada) provided an opportunity to examine the issue using reliable data for both
supervisory training and injury experience. The study cohort represents 39.3 million hours of
construction work in the pre-intervention period and 41.5 million hours post-intervention.
The results show that as the density of trained supervisors increases, there is a statistically
significant reduction in the rate of lost-time injuries. Non-linear regression analysisformula
Y=b0+(b1/t)yielded an R2 value of 0.523 and a p-value of 0.043 for the Lambton County
data. The provincial data yielded an R2 value of 0.812 and a p-value of 0.006.
These results support efforts to make supervisory training a mandatory requirement in
Ontario construction, as part of a multi-faceted strategy to reduce injuries and fatalities.

1. Introduction
The Ontario construction industry has a relatively high rate of both fatal and non-fatal injuries
compared to other industrial sectors [4,5,6,7], and it faces many occupational health and
safety challenges.

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Supervisors are seen as one of the most important agents for controlling hazards on
construction sites. The importance of supervisory training has long been emphasized by
many organizations, companies, and agencies [1,2,3], and is generally recognized as a key
factor for improving occupational health and safety. This recognition is reflected in the
number and range of health-and-safety training programs targeted at supervisors. Also,
articles in Health and Safety trade magazines and other non-technical publications
commonly identify supervisory training as a key factor in improving H&S performance.
Authoritative data to support this belief, however, is scarce.
In recent years, representatives from both labour and management in Ontario construction
have initiated discussions to make supervisory training a requirement under the provinces
construction-safety regulations. They argue that such mandatory training could be a key
factor in driving further improvements in occupational health and safety in construction [6].
This study examines data on injury rates and health-and-safety training for supervisors within
the cohort of construction work undertaken on behalf of members of the Sarnia Lambton
Industrial Education Co-operative (IEC) [8], a group consisting of the major buyers of
construction in the Lambton County.
The concentration of petrochemical and similarly large industrial facilities in the
Sarnia/Lambton County region offers a unique opportunity to assess the influence of safety
culture on construction activity. The major buyers of construction in Sarnia have a more
advanced safety culture than buyers in other areas have. This may be due to the inherently
dangerous nature of the work, processes, and materials that the clients deal with and their
concern over responsible carenot only for their own employees, but also for others working
at their facilities, as well as the general public and the environment. Their health and safety
values are imposed on construction firms and their workers as part of the contractor
selection and oversight processes.
Incidental data analyses over the years have consistently shown that Lambton County has a
much lower injury rate than the provincial average, and further, that the members of the
Sarnia Construction Association (generally the large construction employers based in
Lambton County, much of whose work is performed for the major buyers) have a much lower
injury rate than their provincial counterparts.

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In 2004, IEC members (major construction buyers/clients ) required construction firms

carrying out work at their premises to ensure that the construction supervisors had
completed the Basics of Supervising training program offered by the Construction Safety
Association of Ontario (CSAO). The training addresses legal responsibilities, communications,
problem solving, health and safety programs, site emergencies and accident investigation,
and how to understand and prevent construction injuries and fatalities. It is provided either
as a three-day instructor-led training course or as self-paced home-study program. All
successful applicants were required to pass a supervised examination.
This demand for the training prompted an intense delivery program in the Lambton-County
area throughout 2004-2007. The number of persons trained during this period is shown in
Table 1 and 2.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1 Data sources

Data for this project was drawn from three primary sources.
IEC
Each construction contractor working at an IEC-member project is required to submit both
the number of hours worked and the number of reportable injuries monthly. Each IEC
member forwards the totals for their facility to the IEC.
WSIB
Ontarios Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) compiles employer-submitted data
on employment, lost-time injuries (LTIs), and no-lost-time injuries (NLTIs). The data was
obtained via the WSIBs Enterprise Information Warehouse. This data was used to provide
the measures on LTI and NLTI rates for Lambton County and for all Ontario.
CSAO
The Construction Safety Association of Ontario provides training as one of its services and
maintains data on people trained in a variety of health and safety programs.

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2.2 Additional comments on the data

The WSIB data obtained at a county level does not match exactly to the IEC data, since
contractors with head offices in Lambton County may carry out work in other areas, and,
conversely, not all of the work for IEC clients is performed by companies based in Lambton
County.
Since contractors working at IEC-member properties also perform work elsewhere, they get
the benefit of having trained supervisors at these non-IEC projects. Also, the workforce is
mobile. Supervisors who were trained for an IEC project could move and be employed within
another construction firm that has no direct ties to IEC projects.
For these reasons, the Lambton County data is probably a very good surrogate to measure
the influence of mandatory supervisory training.
Hours worked
The IEC hours data is based on actual hours worked from employer-provided reports
submitted to the IEC-member client.
The WSIB hours data is derived from assessable earnings/payroll data submitted by
employers. There is a maximum value for assessable earningscurrently $73,300 per
annum per workerwhich may lead to some underestimation of the actual hours worked
when referring to this data for sectors with high wage rates.
The assessable earnings data is divided by the average hourly wage rate to get the hours
data. The average hourly wage rate is determined by the WSIB by monitoring a large sample
of the payroll data submitted in support of disability claims. The average hourly wage would
tend to overestimate the hours worked in a scenario with high wage rates, since the average
would be lower than the actual hourly wage at IEC projects.
The result of these two effects is that the WSIB hours-worked data for a unionized
construction firm is likely to be somewhat higher than the actual hours worked.

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Within the IEC cohort, there have been changes in the number of IEC members during the
study period. The growth in hours worked during the study period reflects both the true
growth in this sector as well as increasing membership and reporting within the IEC
membership.
Reportable injuries
The IEC data includes work-related injuries and illnesses that result in medical-aid treatment
and/or disability involving modified work or days off work. For example, if a construction
worker was injured and sought treatment at the clients on-site medical facility, an external
clinic or hospital, or the workers family physician, it would be classed a reportable injury.
Construction employers report this information to the IEC client. Contract requirements for
IEC members include reporting of such injuries as well as those that result in time away from
work.
The WSIB data includes no-lost-time injuries (NLTIs) as well as lost-time injuries (LTIs). An
NLTI is a case in which an injured worker seeks medical treatment via a physician, clinic, or
hospital emergency service. An LTI is a case in which an injured worker was unable to return
to work the next day. This data would include injuries that were reported by employers based
in Lambton County regardless of where the worker was injured, not just those injuries
occurring during work for an IEC-member client.
The WSIB data would also include chronic/latent disease cases that would not normally be
reported to the IEC, since the diseases may not have been linked to the work being
undertaken at the time of the report. The data set for 1996-2006 includes 38 such cases
out of the 432 lost-time injuries reported in Lambton County for that period. Those claims
account for 8.8% of all lost-time claims compared to 1.8% for the province as a whole. This
difference may be due to enhanced awareness of the links between occupational exposure
and illness, and/or higher-than-average exposure to asbestos in the Lambton-County region
(32 of the 38 cases involved cancers and 16 of those were for mesothelioma).

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3. Results
Table 1: Number of Supervisors Trained, 2000-2007
# of Supervisors
Trained
Sarnia
All Ontario

2000
27
1517

2001
66
1,553

2002
36
1,125

2003
54
1,600

2004
372
1,974

2005
299
3,006

2006
37
2,188

2007
212
3,257

Cumulative Sarnia
Cumulative All Ontario

27
1,517

93
3,070

129
4,195

183
5,795

555
7,769

854
10,775

891
12,963

1,103
16,220

Table 2 Rate of Trained Supervisors, 2000-2007

# of trained supervisors
per 100 workers
2000
2001
2002
Sarnia
0.90
2.57
3.51
All Ontario
0.82
1.53
1.94

2003
5.20
2.43

2004
17.23
3.16

2005
15.67
4.17

2006
15.53
4.91

2007
17.41
6.04

As shown in Figure 1, the rate of trained supervisors in Lambton County was similar to the
provincial rate prior to 2004. In 2004, the IEC contract requirement for trained supervisors
caused the rate of trained supervisors in Lambton County to increase substantially. The rate
has been maintained at approximately 16 trained supervisors per 100 workers since 2004.

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Hours and Injuries

Data for the years 1998-2007 (inclusive) are shown in the following tables.

Year
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007

Derived Hrs
WorkedAll
Ont.
Construction
304,027,295
327,318,717
369,672,792
400,227,384
433,021,946
473,359,652
495,187,574
516,100,477
527,197,106
534,838,725

Derived
Hrs
Worked
Lambton
6,000,284
5,745,815
6,030,763
7,237,561
7,345,654
7,032,381
6,443,161
10,897,814
11,478,075
12,671,300

IEC Hrs

LTI
Lambton

NLTI
Lambton

IEC
Reportable
Injuries

4,081,000
3,635,000
3,715,000
5,028,000
4,520,600
3,629,300
3,807,100
7,188,422
7,641,953
8,584,623

43
27
47
40
43
34
41
48
36
27

218
199
197
249
283
248
181
282
288
364

47
35
37
58
66
52
25
61
38
35

Injury Frequency Rates

The calculated frequency rates per 200,000 hrs are shown below.

Year
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007

LTI Freq.,
Lambton
1.43
0.94
1.56
1.11
1.17
0.97
1.27
0.88
0.63
0.43

LTI
Freq.,
Ont
3.48
3.25
3.23
3.1
2.72
2.51
2.56
2.57
2.37
2.16

NLTI
Freq.,
Lambton
7.27
6.93
6.53
6.88
7.71
7.05
5.62
5.18
5.02
5.75

NLTI
Freq.,
Ont.
7.89
8.2
8.04
7.73
7.7
7.25
6.79
7.12
6.76
6.81

IEC
Reportable
Injury Rate
2.3
1.93
1.99
2.31
2.92
2.87
1.31
1.7
0.99
0.82

These data show that the injury rates in Lambton County are consistently better than the
provincial average injury rates.

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The Lambton LTI and NLTI rates are consistently much lower than those in the rest of the
province although the difference in the NLTI rates is not as profound. This may be due to a
heightened awareness of the importance of early medical intervention in preventing minor
injuries from progressing to more serious injuries that result in temporary disability.
Anecdotally, there have been reports that employers with heightened safety awareness will
seek medical treatment for their workers when other employers normally would not.
The smaller difference in NLTI rates than in LTI rates may also be due to the higher
proportion of work in rate groups where the risk of eye injury is greater. There is a relatively
high proportion of industrial construction involving welding and grinding in Lambton County.
This kind of work may be partially responsible for the increased incidence of NLTIs. Eye
injuries are much more likely than other injuries to be treated at a medical facility. Data to
confirm this hypothesis are not available due to limitations in the data recorded in the WSIB
database.

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During the period 2001 2004, Lambton county was not experiencing significant growth in
construction employment. Since 2004, however, the rate of employment growth in Lambton
County has substantially exceeded the provincial growth rate.
Since 2004, there has been a marked improvement in the LTI rate in Lambton County. It has
exceeded the improvement rate in the rest of the province. This is notable, since Lambton
county was already operating with a lower LTI rate than the rest of the province and still
managed to show twice the rate of improvement during a time of tremendous employment
growth. Conventional wisdom suggests that employment growth would be associated with an
increased risk of injury due to an increase in the number of new workers and new
companies.
The influence of IEC client work can be seen when comparing the change in employment
data for Lambton County and that reported by the IEC.

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4. Discussion of factorsother than supervisor trainingthat may have

influenced injury rates in Lambton County
Discussions with contractors, associations, and other sources familiar with construction
activity in the Lambton County area indicate that the nature of work undertaken since 2004
in the area has not been significantly different from that done in prior years. The volume of
work has increased, but not the nature of the work.
There has not been a major change in the construction tools, materials, equipment, or
processes used during this period in Lambton County. Additionally, the same contractors
appear to be carrying out the majority of the work during this period.
One might wonder whether the change in performance may be due to changes in
administrative practices within the companies and/or the WSIB, but there have been no
major changes to WSIB policies on claim acceptance or rejection practices that might
artificially affect the rates in Lambton County. Comments from those working with
contractors in the area indicate no significant change in how they are dealing with either the
MOL or the WSIB, and no significant change in their disability-management plans.
The level of enforcement by the Ministry of Labour in Sarnia remained relatively unchanged
during this period, in that no additional inspectors were assigned to Sarnia during the period.
Results
The experience in Lambton County since IEC members implemented mandatory supervisory
training appears to demonstrate a relationship between enhanced lost-time injury reduction
and increased density of trained supervisors (see fig 4). There is an obvious improvement in
performance occurring after the 2004 mandatory supervisory training requirement came
into effect.

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This data was analyzed using non-linear regression. The formula Y=b0+(b1/t), yielded an R2
value of 0.523 and a p-value of 0.043 for the Lambton County data. The provincial data
yielded an R2 value of 0.812 and a p-value of 0.006.
Linear regression analysis showed a statistically significant relationship for the provincial
data, but not for the Lambton County data.

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5. Conclusions
WSIB injury data show a relationship between, on the one hand, the density of supervisors
who have received training in both basic supervisory skills and in health and safety, and, on
the other hand, the rate of lost-time injuries.
This relationship appears to be linear when looking at a province-wide data set, and nonlinear when looking at data from an area where the trained-supervisor density is much
higher. In Lambton County and the Sarnia area in particular, the influence of major buyers of
construction imposing this mandatory training requirement as part of the construction
contract has yielded positive change.
The data support the view that requiring construction supervisors to be trained in basic
supervisory skills and health and safety knowledge will reduce the frequency of disabling
injuries.
In order for such reduction in lost-time injuries to become more universal, this mandatory
requirement for supervisory training must be implemented on all construction projects. In
Ontario, supervisory training can be made a mandatory requirement in the Construction
Regulation under the provincial Occupational Health and Safety Act.

6. Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the support and assistance of the following:

Sarnia Construction Association

Sarnia Lambton Industrial Education Co-operative

Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario

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References
1. Construction Industry Institute, Supervisory Development for the Construction
Industry Research Report R 40-11, 1996, University of Texas, Austin Tx, USA.
2. Construction Owners Association of Alberta, Model Contractors H&S Program (1996)
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 1996.
3. F. E. Bird, Management Guide to Loss Control, Institute Press, Atlanta Georgia 1974.
4. Construction Safety Association of Ontario and the Workplace Safety and Insurance
Board of Ontario, Construction Industry Health and Safety Summit 2007 Toronto,
Ontario Canada.
5. Construction Safety Association of Ontario, Annual Reports 1980-2007, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada. www.csao.org
6. Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario, Premium Rates Manuals 19802008, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. www.wsib.on.ca
7. Center for Construction Research and Training, Construction Chart Book, 4th Edition,
Silver Springs, Maryland 2007.
8. For more information on the IEC, refer to http://www.sarniasafety.com.

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